BilT Guitars makes music, one custom guitar at a time

By kathy a. bolten

Local musician and record producer Brandon Darner had a request: Could luthier Tim Thelen build an electric guitar with special effects installed in the guitar’s body?

“I was highly resistant to the idea for a long time,” said Thelen, who at the time co-owned The Lutherie Shop, a guitar repair shop near Drake University. Darner persisted and “finally broke me down and we did it. … And it actually turned out pretty cool.”

Darner, a member of the alternative rock band The Envy Corps, played the electric guitar made by Thelen and Bill Henss, a repair shop employee, during the band’s concerts.

“I would manipulate the effects while playing the guitar, which was a little different than an average guitar player,” Darner said. “After a show, a lot of guys would come up and go, ‘What was that you were doing during the song?’ And I’d be like ‘Oh, it’s a modded guitar a guy back [in Des Moines] helped me make.’”

That was in 2008.

The following year, Thelen and repair shop employee Bill Henss developed a prototype and then handcrafted a batch of eight more of the electric guitars, calling the model the Relevator. They debuted the guitars through a company they called BilT Guitars, a combination of their first names.  

In September 2009, “Premier Guitar,” a national publication that reviews guitars and other music-related equipment, featured the Relevator. The magazine described the guitar’s features, concluding, “the Relevator would not have trouble working its way into any lineup.”

The magazine article and Thelen and Darner’s connections in the music world “helped spark [BilT Guitars] becoming a real thing,” Darner said.

For about four years, BilT Guitars made a dozen or so electric guitars annually. But as musicians learned about the custom guitar and its unique features, demand increased.

By 2013, orders for the guitars had grown so much that it was no longer feasible to make the instruments as a side gig. Thelen, the company’s owner, and Darner, who had joined the company, decided to make manufacturing custom guitars a full-time business.

“Our name was getting out there so we had to make the move,” Darner said. “It might take a company years to get reputable players in their corner. We were lucky and had that pretty quick.”

Who strums BilT’s guitars

In 2023, the U.S. had 190 acoustic and electric guitar manufacturers that produced an annual revenue of over $785.4 million, according to IBISWorld, a New York-based international company that researches thousands of industries worldwide. The bulk of the manufacturers are located in California, New York, Massachusetts and Tennessee.

Many of the manufacturers, like Gibson and Fender, produce thousands of guitars annually, all of which look and sound the same.

The custom nature of a BilT guitar is what has attracted musicians to the Des Moines-based business, Thelen and Darner said.

Wayne Sermon, a guitarist with the pop-rock band Imagine Dragons, plays several different BilT guitars during concerts. Each guitar was specially designed to create specific effects Sermon wanted to achieve, according to an article in “Premier Guitar.” Sermon played his BilT guitar during the band’s 2014 performance at the Grammy Awards, where they won the award for Best Rock Performance.

Nels Cline, the lead guitarist for Chicago-based rock band Wilco, and Dave Keuning, a native of Pella and a founding member of the rock band The Killers, both perform with BilT guitars.  

As BilT Guitars grew, it began taking over more and more of the space it shared with The Lutherie Shop at 1159 24th St., eventually prompting the lutherie to relocate to Urbandale.

The guitar manufacturer now crafts over 100 electric guitars a year. Each guitar has its own unique features; rarely are any two alike, said Thelen, the company’s owner. (Henss is no longer with BilT Guitar.)

Guitars are made in batches of five. Each guitar body starts with a chunk of wood such as walnut or pine. An inverted pin router precisely cuts the wood into the desired shape following a template. The instruments’ necks are made from hardwoods like walnut or maple. Fingerboards are made from Indian Rosewood, a traditional guitar hardwood.

The guitar manufacturer annually uses between 1,500 and 2,000 board feet of wood, much of which comes from Iowa, Darner and Thelen said.

A guitar’s signature feature is called the headstock, the end piece on the instrument’s neck. BilT’s headstock is a soft, serpentine-like swoop opposite of the tuning pegs. BilT’s name is imprinted on an indented part of the swoop.

After the bodies and necks are made, they are sanded and painted. More sanding and buffing occur during applications of the instruments’ lacquer finishes. Fret boards, strings and electronic components are added.

It can take a month or more to build one guitar. Prices for the instruments begin at $1,999 and depending on customization, can cost $9,000 or more. The average price of a BilT guitar is around $3,300. Customers typically receive their guitars four to six months after placing an order.

About two years ago, the company upgraded its website to allow customers to design their guitars online. “That was a big step for us,” Thelen said. About 20% of BilT’s business is now generated from its website.

BilT Guitars is a Des Moines manufacturer of custom-made guitars and is located near Drake University. Photos, beginning in the top left corner, show the guitar necks the company makes; adjustments being made to one of the necks; Patrik Emmert, the company's head luthier, filing a fret; the body of a guitar, which starts out with a nearly 2-inch-thick chunk of hardwood; painting the guitar; and the finished product. Tim Thelen (left) and Brandon Darner are in the last photo. Photos by John Retzlaff

Growing, but not too fast

In the past 10 years, much of BilT Guitars’ growth has been from word of mouth. Thelen and Darner want to expand the company’s reach by expanding BilT’s fan base.

What they don’t want, however, is explosive growth.

“We don’t want our growth to get out of control,” said Thelen, 48. “We want to keep the growth reasonable, slow and manageable. What we do is super laser intensive, a super high-skill situation.”

The company employs six people, all with specific sets of hard-to-find skills. “We don’t want to burn them out,” Thelen said.

When BilT Guitars has had small spurts of growth, Thelen and Darner said they found ways to maximize production without harming the quality of their guitars. They are continuing to look for ways to streamline production, they said.

People who specialize in growing companies likely would tell BilT Guitars to stop doing things that are difficult or time consuming and to limit customers’ options, Thelen and Darner said. When BilT began moving in that direction, interest in the company waned, they said.

“What really makes us unique is the thing we will say ‘yes’ to,” said Darner, 47. “We have an expertise of hearing the customer and making them a guitar of their dreams. We are really unique in the guitar space with our custom, customizations.”

Thelen and Darner said they don’t want the music sector to become saturated with BilT Guitars.

“Being scarce is good,” Darner said. “Making very unique guitars is good and doing those two things keeps growth manageable.” 

Extraordinary customized guitars

Special requests from BilT customers

Customers from around the world have turned to BilT Guitars for uniquely customized electric guitars, Tim Thelen and Brandon Darner said. 

A customer from Romania requested a pattern of elongated diamonds laser-cut into the guitar’s wood body. The pickguard was made with a clear acrylic; the diamond design was laser-cut into its backside, which was then painted gold. “There was no part of [the] guitar that [wasn’t] incredibly specific to the customer’s details,” Darner said. 

Another guitar was made from a Hawaiian Koa tree, a scarce tree that has unique wood grain lines. “There was no margin of error in cutting the wood,” Thelen said of the $700 piece of raw wood used to make the instrument’s body. 

Another customer requested the seal of the Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association etched into the back of his custom guitar, which was painted with black metallic paint on which gold flakes were added. The customer, who lived in New Jersey, also asked that his grandfather’s initials – in the grandfather’s handwriting – be included on the guitar’s fretboard. The finished product, which took about nine months to complete, cost over $9,000, Thelen said. 

“Part of what we’re doing is creating a positive experience for our customers and getting them involved in designing the guitar,” Darner said. “It’s just something we do that sets us apart from the other [companies].” 

Earlier this year, Darner and Thelen reclaimed wood from the beams in the building where BilT’s workshop is located. The building was built around 1912, and pine used to make the beams came from trees that were likely 150 years or older, Darner said. Bodies for 12 guitars were made from the reclaimed pine. Character marks created by years of wear and tear were kept in the wood. 

“That is a pretty cool project,” Darner said. 

Advice for small manufacturing startups

The Business Record asked Tim Thelen and Brandon Darner of BilT Guitars in Des Moines their top tips for people contemplating starting a small manufacturing company. Here’s their responses:

Brandon Darner

“Two things. One, be excellent at what you do. If it’s not good, it doesn’t matter. And secondly, have a vision. If people can’t intrinsically tell what you’ve got, you’ll never stand out.”

Tim Thelen

“You need to get used to the idea that you’ll never arrive, that you never get there. You’re not going to get that big sale and then everything’s suddenly easier. It’s always going to be difficult. You need to be willing to work three to 50 times harder than everybody else works. If you do, and you get conditioned to that, then it’ll work.”